The Quick Read
- Pleased.com, a customer service software company founded in Europe about four years ago, opened its first Philippine office at Three/NEO Building in BGC on September 8.
- The company plans to hire up to 110 employees locally over the next 12 months, mostly in technology and product roles, scaling its engineering headcount from 10 to 50 by year end.
- Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano attended the office blessing, framing the investment as a way to connect Filipino talent with global opportunities without requiring relocation abroad.
- The build-out supports Pleased.com’s push into the US small and mid-sized business market, where its platform already resolves roughly 75 percent of customer contacts through AI.
Pleased.com has set up its Philippine headquarters at the Three/NEO Building in Bonifacio Global City, marking the customer service software company’s first physical office in the country since it was founded in Europe about four years ago. The Pleased.com Philippine office opened its doors on September 8, and the company is not treating it as a small step. Founder and CEO Jonathan Sterling said during the office blessing that the company plans to hire between 100 and 110 employees locally over the next 12 months, with most of the roles concentrated in technology and product work.
The Company Has Already Started Building Its Local Team
Pleased.com currently employs around 10 engineers in the Philippines and is targeting 50 by the end of the year. That is a fast ramp for a company that, until now, operated entirely remotely. Sterling said the choice to anchor the Pleased.com Philippine office in Taguig’s central business district came down to talent and infrastructure. He described BGC as the place with the best talent and the best infrastructure, and that combination is what the company is betting its expansion on.
The hiring push is aimed specifically at Filipino graduates with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in STEM fields, the kind of talent that often looks abroad for higher pay. Sterling framed the pitch as an alternative to that pattern, one where engineers can earn well without leaving home. He put it plainly when he said engineers can still stay in the culture that you love while building a serious technical career.
The Product Behind the Office Opening
Pleased.com sells live chat, email ticketing, and voice support software to businesses, and its platform currently handles between six million and seven million customer contacts a year. Its client roster includes Lithuanian credit institution Unlokk and African digital bank Tenn.io, giving the company a footprint that spans multiple continents despite its relatively young age.
Artificial intelligence plays a meaningful role in how that volume gets handled. Sterling has said that roughly 75 percent of customer contacts on the platform are resolved end to end by AI, with the rest routed to human agents. Even so, Sterling has been careful about how the company positions itself, insisting that Pleased.com is a customer service software company that uses AI as a tool, not an AI company built around the technology as its core identity. That distinction matters for a firm competing in a crowded customer service software market where AI capability is now table stakes rather than a differentiator.
Local Officials Are Framing This as a Talent Story
Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano attended the office blessing and positioned the investment as a way to connect Filipino talent with global opportunities without requiring people to relocate abroad to access them. That framing lines up with how Sterling described his own hiring rationale, and it points to why BGC in particular keeps attracting companies chasing engineering talent rather than just back-office headcount.
Pleased.com’s expansion is also tied to a specific market goal. The company is using its Philippine build-out to push further into the small and mid-sized business segment, particularly in the United States, where competition among customer service software providers is dense and margins depend heavily on how efficiently a company can staff support and engineering functions.
The Office Opening Points to a Deeper Talent Race in BGC
The Pleased.com Philippine office adds to a pattern that has been building in BGC for some time, foreign software companies choosing Taguig over other business districts specifically for engineering hires rather than general staffing. A company willing to commit to 50 engineers within a single year, on top of administrative staff already hired, is making a statement about how it views the depth of the local talent pool.
Whether Pleased.com hits that hiring target will say something about how tight competition for STEM graduates has become in Metro Manila, where multinational firms, local outsourcing companies, and homegrown tech startups are all drawing from the same pool of computer science and engineering graduates. For now, the office at Three/NEO Building gives Pleased.com a physical foothold and a public commitment that puts its hiring plans on record.
Check out their main website: https://pleased.com/
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